


The Mongoose

by Cryptographic_Delurk



Series: The Ideal Adventuring Party is... [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Casual Murder, Gen, Less Introspection More Dialogue, Mild Gore, Multi, Past Fenris/Isabela - Freeform, Past Isabela/Merrill - Freeform, Post-Kirkwall, Pre-Relationship, Proto Industrial, Slavery, Tal Vashoth, Tevinter Imperium, Unofficial Worldbuilding, social caste
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27037327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryptographic_Delurk/pseuds/Cryptographic_Delurk
Summary: “If you want to get closer to people, I think you have to talk to them.”“What if they’re afraid of you?” Fernis asked. “What if you’re afraid of them?”Varania’s voice was guarded. “Then you have to give each other reasons not to be afraid.”--Fenris attempts to reach out to a wider variety of people in Minrathous. Unfortunately opening lines for communication is the same as creating platforms for argument.
Relationships: Anders & Fenris & Merrill (Dragon Age), Anders & Fenris (Dragon Age), Anders/Fenris/Merrill (Dragon Age), Fenris & Merrill (Dragon Age), Fenris & Varania (Dragon Age)
Series: The Ideal Adventuring Party is... [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1753798
Comments: 9
Kudos: 15





	The Mongoose

**Author's Note:**

> Non-exhaustive list of content warnings for this series now includes reference to self harm, ambient homophobia, and graphic depiction of butchery. Warnings for this series are cumulative, so please continue to beware of themes of racism and colourism being prominent, including unreliable narration and Fenris borrowing the vocabulary of his systematic dehumanisation when he gets self-deprecating.
> 
> Apologies, I’m never quite sure what and how much to warn for in fics that reference so many heavy topics, but if you feel my notes have mislead your expectations or misrepresented my content I am, at the very least, open to discussing it in the comments.
> 
> Read & Relax.

When Fenris returned to the room, the door was wide open. Personal effects, along with Merrill’s table and chairs, had been pressed against the walls. Elves he had never seen before sat on the floor inside.

Everyone turned to look at Fenris with questioning eyes, like he was the intruder. And he stood, unsure of how to proceed, until Merrill leapt up from her place at the head of the circle and rushed to his side. She caught his arm and dragged him across the threshold.

“Oh good, you’re here, Fenris! Just in time!”

He noticed she’d pulled him into the corner near the upturned table, instead of towards the others.

“What is this?” he asked warily, glancing sideways at the others in the room.

“What’s what?” Merrill said reflexively, before answering her own question. “You know I’ve been giving lessons. It’s my turn to host the location. Tuesday the whole lot of us had to march across to Rosie’s place. Can you believe she usually comes all the way from the other side of the marina to see us? We got terribly lost and were an hour late. But it was a very exciting trip!”

Fenris huffed. “Must you do this here?” he demanded in a wary undertone. “We are all fugitives living in this room. It is meant to be secret.”

“But it’s good to rotate where we host locations,” Merrill said. “It makes it harder for outsiders to know our schedule. And it lets us feel at home in each other’s homes, and where we might find help or shelter in emergency.” A couple more stragglers walked inside, and Merrill waved them on to sit in the circle forming in the centre of the room. “I’ll be there in a moment,” she called after them.

This ship had clearly already sailed, and Fenris attempted to resign himself to half of Minrathous feeling free to barge inside at any hour of the night.

“Perhaps I should go. When will your lesson conclude?”

“Oh, no no, Fenris,” Merrill pouted. “Please stay. At least long enough for me to introduce you to everyone.”

“No,” Fenris said.

“Why don’t you talk to Nemo at least?” Merrill pleaded. “He makes cosmetics. You’re always walking about in that cloak and nervously pulling at the marks on your chin. I bet he can get you something to cover them that actually matches your skintone. So you don’t have to muck up your face with pitch like a wastrel.” Merrill tilted her head ponderously. “Or a caricature from a terrible bard show.”

Before Fenris could snap back, someone walked up behind him. Someone tall and with far to little sense of personal space. Fenris pushed Merrill behind him and turned, instinctively at the ready to fight.

He let out a sharp exhale of breath when it was only Anders.

Anders seemed neither intimidated by nor interested in Fenris. He spoke over Fenris’s head to Merrill. “Well, I’m here,” he groaned. “Just like you asked. What is it you wanted me to do?”

“Oh, Anders,” Merrill acknowledged. She’d taken to rubbing a hand across Fenris’s shoulder and down his arm, like she was soothing a jumpy house cat. “Yes! Many of the mages would like to learn how to use healing magic. And you know I’m just terrible at it. So I’d like it if you could help me show them.”

Anders and Merrill had somehow collectively boxed Fenris in between them. He turned his head down and exhaled wearily at the floor. There went his last hope that this was any other kind of lesson, instead of explicitly a _magic_ one.

“What will you practice on?” Fenris snapped, pulling his arm away from Merrill. “Plan to get your arm all bloody so everyone can practice healing the cuts?”

“That might work,” Merrill said agreeably. “Though I think between the lot of us there’s probably enough blisters and sores to go around without it.”

“You probably just want to start by healing bruised fruit,” Anders said. And then more urgently, “Will Varania be among them?”

Merrill nodded.

Fenris watched as Anders’s shoulders slumped and he gave a tremendous roll of his eyes. And it was strange seeing Anders this expressive after several months of stony silence.

“Yes, just what I need,” Anders quipped. “Hours trying to teach a woman who’s so terrified of me she might explode a spellbloom in my face by mistake.”

“I doubt she’s the only one.” Merrill’s voice dripped with mock sweetness. “Have you considered that humans have given elves very little cause to be unafraid? Trust is earned, lethallin. This is your chance.”

Fenris was lost. “Terrified?” he repeated.

There was an uncomfortable moment where Anders and Merrill seemed to regard him with blank stares.

“Unbelievable,” Anders scoffed, finally addressing Fenris directly. “Are you really so dense that you haven’t noticed that your sister will barely look at me? Or the way she practically runs out of the room anytime it seems she might be left alone with me? Or that she has on multiple occasions tried to convince you to kick me out?”

Fenris had not. He crossed his arms over his chest. “She has every right to fear an abomination,” he reasoned.

Anders bristled at the word. “Yes, and I suppose it’s also escaped your notice that she’s even more terrified of you?” he spat. “Why don’t you go threaten to rip her throat out again? I’m sure that will help.”

“But where will we get bruised fruit at this hour?” Merrill said, chattering loudly and aimlessly over Fenris’s warning hiss. “I suppose there must be some in a garbage heap somewhere. Maybe we can send someone out for some, since we need it for the healing magic.”

Anders frowned. “Creation magic.”

“Excuse me?” Merrill said.

“I know I let it go earlier. But it’s ‘Creation magic’,” Anders corrected.

“But I mean healing magic,” Merrill said. “That’s the one I’m bad at. I can make magic insect swarms and do your dirty magic lubricant spell.”

“I just mean if you’re going to be teaching, you should use the correct terms, instead of colloquialisms like ‘healing magic’,” Anders said. “Since the four schools of magic are divided by how spells are cast, instead of their utilitarian function, it’s more sensible from this side of the staff.”

Even Fenris, who was preoccupied trying not to wonder about his sister, could tell this was obviously the wrong thing to say by the curl on Merrill’s lips.

“Since everyone is so very impatient,” Merrill said, “I thought it made more sense to dispense with formalities. But if you want me to do things properly from the beginning, the five paths to magic are _Vir'Alasan_ , _Vir'Elgarare_ , _Vir'Renanes_ , _Vir'Hanines_ , and _Vir'Halames_ ,” she rattled off in Elvish.

“You can’t possibly be serious,” Anders protested.

“It is the way I learned,” Merrill said firmly. “I’d hardly call my magic less effective than yours.”

“Look, as bad as the Circles are, they do know what they’re talking about when they’re tasked with teaching hundreds of children the fundamentals of magic.”

“Are they?” Merrill challenged. “Why is is then that Hawke, in learning magic from her father, another Circle mage, was taught of six schools?”

“Just because some mages like splitting the Primal tree in two and regrouping spells along the Entropic-Spirit boundary doesn’t mean-”

“No, that’s exactly what it means,” Merrill cut him off. “How we divvy our spells so they fit under this banner or that is arbitrary. The way your Chantry does it is not the only way. Much less the only _correct_ way.”

“Five schools doesn’t even balance correctly!” Anders waved his hands expressively.

Fenris was not sure where he’d gone so wrong in life that he was now standing between two mages arguing minutia about the classification of their accursed gifts. He had the odd feeling it had something to do with Isabela complimenting the smoulder in his eyes, and it worried him that he could not fully bring himself to regret it.

“Enough-!” he began.

“Actually-” an elf only just making their way through the door cut in over him, “here in Tevinter they teach ten schools of magic. I overheard it when Carron was arranging professors for the Circle.”

Anders and Merrill gave almost identical huffs.

“Preposterous.”

“Okay, although it may be arbitrary, ten does seem a bit excessive.”

“I am leaving,” Fenris announced.

“Oh, how rude of me,” Merrill demurred. “Let me introduce you. Fenris, this is Fillian.” She gestured graciously between them.

“No,” Fenris warned, and stomped past this Fillian into the hall before he could be introduced to any more mages.

Merrill, unfortunately, followed him out. “Pleeeease, Fenris,” she whined. “There’s something I have to ask you.”

She was doing that wide-eyed pitiful look.

Fenris cursed himself for entertaining it. “What is it?”

Anders was hovering, glancing nervously between the group of elves in the centre of the room and Merrill, before settling into a vantage point – leaned against the door frame where he might keep an eye on both at once.

“Well, you know these aren’t the only lessons I’m teaching…” Merrill began hesitantly.

“Get to the point, witch,” Fenris urged.

Merrill’s voice remained soft and hesitant, like he was an explosive bound to go off any moment. “I know you only learned how to read a few years ago…”

The effect was immediate. Fenris felt his shoulders hunch defensively. _Perfect_. They were talking about this here, in the hall where anyone could hear them. And if they went and talked about this in the room it would be with a dozen other people standing by.

“Several others have expressed an interest in learning the talent,” Merrill continued. At this point her voice picked up and became terribly babbly. “Only it turns out I’m terrible at teaching it, as I can’t really remember learning myself. Mareth- They said I was already reading simple sentences when I was four years aged, so much too young to know how it happened.” Merrill paused to take a calming breath. “I thought you might be better suited for the task. You remember how Hawke and Varric showed you, and what worked.”

Fenris looked down at his feet and shuffled his weight between them uncomfortably. The shame burned in his mouth. He was still not as fast a reader as he would like. And it had always upset him how quickly the rumour of his reading lessons had spread around Kirkwall, and how very careful everyone had been not to mock him for it. Even Anders. The only thing worse than an abomination’s contempt was his pity.

“Oh, let him be, Merrill. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to,” Anders butted in. “You know I might be able to help. Hawke-” Whatever this had to do with Hawke, Fenris never found out as Anders quickly redirected. “I didn’t learn to read until I was thirteen, after I came to the Circle. I still remember a few things.”

Part of Fenris knew he was being unfair and petty, but the rest of him bristled.

“His Circle teaches him to read and write and lets him study at leisure, and still he calls it slavery,” Fenris affected a languid drawl.

For a moment any spare levity falls from Anders’s face, and then it makes a viscous reappearance.

“Yes, and if I had been a good little mage who minded his betters, someday I’d have been some Chantry scholar’s housepet. Researching and writing his dissertations for him, that he would then put his name on and publish. Perhaps not that different from how you were chosen to be a Magister’s pet bodyguard.” Anders’s smile is toothy and mean. “I do pride myself that only one of us was that whipped.”

Fenris knew he would regret it if he attempted to rip out Anders’s intestines and feed them to him, but it was a struggle to remember it in that moment.

“It’s so _nice_ to have the two of you talking again,” Merrill said, tapping her fingers against her arm. Fenris couldn’t honestly tell if she was being sarcastic or not. “Such a friendly couple. I did miss it.”

“And to think I did as well,” Fenris snipped. “Can’t imagine why.”

Anders, surprisingly, seemed to have no nasty little retort for this. His cheeks flushed and he looked down at the wooden floor.

“If that is all,” Fenris gave them both a curt nod.

“Wait, Fenris, you never answered my question!” Merrill protested. “Won’t you help with reading lessons?”

“The mage has already volunteered the help you need.”

“Yes,” Merrill agreed. “But Anders doesn’t know Tevene, and doesn’t know what it’s like to be actively denied literacy, and-” Fenris could see her frustration, but then the words burst out of her. “I think it would be good for you.”

“Good for _me_?!” Fenris responded incredulously.

“Yes.” Merrill was resolute. “Please, Fenris. It’s obvious you’re unhappy, feeling lost and without direction. It will give you something productive to do with your time. And you’ll be able to talk with people, and meet people, and I’m sure one of them will know something that will help with your crusade.”

Fenris spit, furious to have his own unhappiness thrown back in his face. “So you’ve thrown in with Varania?! Chastising me for being too idle?”

Merrill groaned and rubbed the side of her head wearily. “You know that is not how I meant it.”

“What I know is that you have filled your time with stupid trifling busy work and intend to drag me down with you,” Fenris snapped. “When you’re not tossing your evil magic about, what are you good for? You’ve told me of your attempts to teach reading have fallen short. And before you’ve mentioned lessons in hunting and gathering and farming. How are those faring? How many are even interested? We’re in a city, you fool!”

This was not what Fenris intended to say, and he knew it was the wrong thing to say, even before Merrill’s lip curled and her expression hardened. But at least she didn’t follow him this time when he made his way down the hall and down the stairs, pushing against the foot traffic that is the rest of Merrill’s arriving guests.

He ran into Varania at the entrance of the building. She was carrying a bag of flatbread and fruit, and her sewing kit. She did not flinch when she saw him, and regarded him with such sternness and arrogance, Fenris could almost pretend she wasn’t afraid of him.

“They are waiting upstairs,” Fenris offered. “Healing magic today?”

Varania nodded in agreement.

They were standing too far apart. Somehow unable to rush past one another.

He began to gripe, to break the silence. “The witch is insane,” he said. “She took leave of her faculties long ago.”

He wasn’t sure if he felt vindicated or bereft when this managed to pull a smile and a small ring of laughter from Varania.

“Indeed,” she agreed, as she walked past him through the entrance. “But I’m not the one keeping her around for a girl friend.”

==

Fenris upended nearly the entire tray of cashews into his sack. It weighed a good three kilos, but that was fine. He moved on to collect almonds, dried mango, more spiced meat in another sack. He was careless with the amounts, gathering as much as he seemed likely to be able to carry. Most of the people here traded only in pennies and bits and favours, and it seemed even with his carelessness he would hardly be able to buy enough to use the entirety of his gold sovereign. But if he collected enough, it might warrant forgoing the unpleasantness of having the grocer woman make change.

It was only a shame there were no apples here.

There was no line at this time, in the middle of the day. Fenris only had to wait patiently as the grocer woman, an elf with a chipped tooth and a grouchy face, weighed the purchases. Fenris deemed seventy silver close enough to the mark to earn his gold and, tossing a satchel of cinnamon sticks atop the pile, made to pay.

The woman, who had before let Fenris take his goods and escape without notice, seemed disinclined to reach out and accept his coin this time.

“You always come here with gold,” she observed. “Nobody gets that much coin from honest work.”

Fenris felt his brow furrow, and after a moment withdrew his hand. He considered and decided the woman spoke truly. Most of his coin had been looted from expeditions with Hawke. What had not had been earned through a variety of mercenary work – chasing down clients for debtors, accompanying nobles on expedition, or hunting the occasional wanted criminal or apostate for the guard. This money was not clean – although Fenris slept easy in the confidence that most of the people it had been plundered from deserved it.

“Well?!” The elvhen woman prompted, irate. “Speak up!”

It seemed Merrill was not the only one of the opinion he could stand to be more sociable.

“I was out of the country until recently,” Fenris explained. “I brought this back from abroad, and had some of it exchanged with the dwarves.”

“From out of the country?”

“Yes.”

The woman studied him critically. “You cannot be anything but Tevinter, Not with a nose like that and skin like that.”

“I am from Seheron,” Fenris disagreed.

“Seheron is part of Tevinter.”

“It is part of the Qun now.”

“The Qun is a people not a country,” the woman said. “Even if the Qun takes us over, Tevinter will always be Tevinter.”

She seemed so unconcerned by the possibility of living occupied by the Qun. Fenris pondered the wisdom of this, and pondered who this woman was to hold such a view. Not a mage, he would guess. And if she was as Liberati as she looked, she could not own this grocery stall legally, only man it.

“What business did a Tevinter elf like you have abroad?” she asked. “How many people did you trample to get there?”

There was no way to count, the road had been so long and paved with blood at every step. “Many,” Fenris answered truthfully. Comparatively Varania had only had to trample one person to get to Kirkwall.

The grocer woman studded him critically, but if she was looking for a lie there were none to be found.

“I’ll accept your coin then,” she said, like she was doing him a favour. She held the gold up to the light, and pressed her nail into it to test its purity and softness. “It would be a poor homecoming if none accepted you. After you had come so far to reinvest in the place you came from.”

==

Fenris’s regrets returned to haunt him quicker than he expected. Merrill burst through the door with a mongoose and two cobras, dangling bodies, strung up at her palm with red twine.

“Hello!” she called, with an almost manic cheeriness.

Fenris shovelled a handful of cashews in his mouth and buried his head deeper into his book, so his nose pressed against an illustration of a Mabari pup.

Fenris’s attempt to not give Merrill an in was ruined when Anders went, “Maker, what have you got there?”

“Oh, nothing, just a week’s worth of dinner.” Merrill stopped at the side of Fenris’s bedroll, hung her spoils down so the inert cobra heads hovered, fangs still bared, in his face. She prodded his side with her big toe, and his brands seared angrily where she touched him. “You see, using what she learned from my _stupid, trifling, useless_ lessons, Anaran managed to trap far more than she and her family could manage to eat. So she passed these along to me in gratitude.”

She spoke in an overly loud voice for Fenris’s benefit. Fenris peeked up at her from underneath scales and fur and paper. Spite, as usual, was not a good look on her.

“We don’t eat those,” Varania offered, from where she embroidered sitting in her own bedroll.

“They’re perfectly safe once you remove the venom glands,” Merrill reassured.

“No, the other one.” Varania pointed at the mongoose.

“Why not? Is it poisonous? Or are they sacred, like the halla?”

Varania shook her head. “No, nothing like that. It’s just not done.” She shrugged. “They keep the snake population down. They are more useful alive.”

“But it is good to have many snakes to eat too.” Merrill hummed in consideration, before poking Fenris again with her toe. “You’re helping, Fenris,” she announced. “Go to the basement and bring some water and something to use for a chopping block.”

“Why should I?” Fenris curled a little tighter in on himself.

“Because you are _brithavast haor’lin_ ,” Merrill said. “ _Ar ma tel'gelan_.”

Fenris decided that digging around the basement for water and a wood block was preferable to lying here and listening to Merrill insult him in Elvish.

By the time he’d returned, Varania was missing, and Merrill had arranged a sheet, a glass jar, a tin of scouring powder, and a set of knives, numerous and varied from the one she used on herself, across the floor. Fenris passed her a woodblock from the neighbour’s stash, and Varania’s wash basin full of water.

He made to walk off, but Merrill grabbed bottom edge of his leggings, and tugged him lightly and urgently. “Sit down. You’re helping.”

“You’re insufferable,” he said, without heat. “What do you need me for?”

“I need you to sit and help me wash the bodies before we start.”

“You don’t need me.”

“Maybe not, but someday someone will,” Merrill said. “And you were wrong about my lessons being useless. And also you’re going to be eating later, so you can help now. That’s how it works.”

That wasn’t how anything worked. One could be wrong and cruel and get away with it. One could gorge themselves on the labour and pain and strife of others.

Fenris sat because he liked Merrill’s fairy tale better than his reality.

Merrill sprinkled the scouring powder lightly over the mongoose, and let Fenris push it under the water. The body was less stiff that he expected, and pliantly spread its limbs and tilted its head as he rubbed his hands into the fur.

The scouring powder was too caustic. It stung his hands, and made his brands light. The wash basin was too small, and Fenris had to wrap the mongoose tail in a coil to fit it under the water. They had used Varania’s wash basin for a lot of things it was never meant to be used for, and Fenris probably owed her a new one at this point.

They had all the wrong tools for doing the wrong job, but he found it soothing somehow. Even when Merrill pointed at the joints and spots he’d missed and instructed him.

The feeling ended when Merrill decided he was finished and, after sending him for clean water, rinsed the mongoose and began to butcher it.

She was deft and precise with the knife, and began to flay the mongoose starting from the very tip of its feet, underneath the nails.

“Most people just cut off the head and limbs at this point,” Merrill explained to him. “But that just doesn’t feel right to me. I suppose his whole body will be chopped up by the end. But it feels a bit premature at this point. Grotesque.”

Fenris struggled to see how it would be any less grotesque than the way Merrill peeled the skin up dripping bloody nails. Or how she flipped the knife in her hand and cut under the mongoose’s lip and peeled teeth from gums. He felt the pull of mana that meant a spell, and Merrill let her fingers fizzle electrically up the side of the animal.

“It keeps the meat tender,” she explained, then looked pointedly at the cobras Fenris was not washing.

But Fenris couldn’t not watch as Merrill worked her way through the process of skinning the beast. When she was done at the limbs and head, she drew the knife up the mongoose’s spine, and cut a pocket in its back. She then thrust her fingers inside, grabbed the mongoose by the waist, and pulled the skin inside out with a muted squelch.

Fenris felt very much like he was about to be ill.

Merrill set aside the mangled pelt, and rearranged the skinned beast on the board, selecting a heavier knife this time. “There’s a lot you wouldn’t want to eat here in the bowels,” she explained. And then turned to face him when he could not respond. “Oh, Fenris,” she giggled. “I’ve seen you shred humans and elves and qunari to pieces. You can’t be squeamish about one little ferret.”

Fenris was going to say that humans and elves and qunari deserved it far more than something so small and innocent as this. But it would not have been true. Innocence and deservedness did not factor into it. Fighting and killing were simply about being the one alive at the end of the melee.

“Yes, but I don’t stick around to muck about in their gore after the fact,” Fenris said instead.

“Debatable,” Anders supplied from across the room. “They’re usually dead before you get around to crushing their hearts, you know?”

“Quiet, mage,” Fenris snapped. “I’ve seen you rip a templar’s cheek off in your teeth.”

“Touchy, touchy,” was all Anders had to say about this.

“Why aren’t you making _him_ help?” Fenris demanded, pointed angrily at Anders with a cobra head.

“Anders helps in other ways,” Merrill shrugged. “Maybe he’ll help do this next time.” She pointed with the edge of her knife at the board. “There’s the kidneys, and liver, and heart. And we can see what things he’s been eating if we cut the stomach.”

Fernis tried very hard to simply scrub snake scales, and not to look as Merrill chattered her way through the cuts. (“You don’t want to make too many perpendicular cuts. Follow the natural contour of his body if you can.”) Fenris didn’t take notice again until she squeezed the mongoose’s thigh over her glass jar, and set it neatly aside, before reaching for the next. She shook her hands loosely, and let the blood drip off them to be collected.

“ _Witch…_ ” Fenris warned.

“I need blood,” Merrill explained. “And here it is.” She set aside the last of the cuts of meat, leaving the woodblock and sheet covered in miscellaneous bits of blood and viscera. She said the spell quickly and smartly, and Fenris watched the excess blood lift into the air around her palm, leaving shreds of tissue drained and pale white behind. Fenris recognised the crisp burning scent of blood magic, but the blood salvaged from the spell far exceeded the amount Merrill burnt to cast it, and she let it fall from her hand into the jar. “If either of you has anything else butchered, please save the blood for me.”

“Absolutely disgusting. Absolute maddness,” Anders once again butted in unnecessarily from the other side of the room.

“Where power is concerned, there is always need for more,” Fenris muttered darkly. “You cannot possibly think I would cooperate with you on this, witch.”

“Fenris is right,” Anders agreed. “One would think you’d had enough taste of your own folly.”

“It’s a path that will end only in more evil,” Fenris said, though he could already feel the tide of weariness overcoming him. They were all so far past lost causes.

“Would it make you feel better if I told you I was saving it to make blood sausage?” Merrill asked dryly. “I could do that too, but it’s not the most efficient use of the resources we have.”

Fenris was frustrated to find Anders speaking in time with him, variations on the same phrase: “It’s not the same.”

Merrill snatched the cobra from his hands, not waiting for fresh water to rinse. She thrust it on the woodblock, and aimed the cleaver below the neck.

“Yes, it is,” she said testily, as she swung the knife up. “The mongoose dies either way.”

==

“It’s outrageous! Years of work and service, and I’m left to die at the side of the road like some common _incaensor_!”

The mage grumbled and repeated the word to himself in an incomprehensible slurry of intonations. ( _In_ -caen-sor? In- _caen_ -sor? In-caen- _sor_!)

Fenris was not truly convinced the beggar was a mage at all, and not simply a raving lunatic. He was wearing a muddied set of mage robes, true. But they could have been picked from any rubish heap.

“They say the Qunari are the true evil in this country, but what about the moral decay of our own!” the mage(?) screeched. “Yes, the Qunari razed and occupied my estate! But it was the Imperial Circle that ripped up my papers and turned me away and left me here in the dust to rot! If they will not provide for their best and most loyal, what Tevinter is there to save?”

 _There never had been a Tevinter to save_ , Fenris thought.

“An estate?” Fenris asked. “Did you own many slaves?”

“Oh, hundreds!” the mage(?) replied. But he looked into Fenris’s eyes so hungry for attention and vindication, and Fenris had a hard time believing a slave master so greedy for the affirmations of someone so dark skinned and pointed at the ears and subhuman as himself.

Fenris reached into his bag and let a handful of cashews fall into the beggar’s hands.

“Maker bless you!” the mage(?) said. He let the cashews fall to the ground and clung to Fenris’s hand with grubby dirty fingers.

Fenris did his best not to wince and recoil. And suddenly Fenris could see it. Danarius had grabbed at him like that from time to time. Danarius had, in some moments, pretended Fenris was a peer when he needed comfort and companionship. Or, rather, in some moments he had dropped the façade that Fenris was not always his peer, and had not always been able to ruin him.

“It is good souls like you that will save this place,” the mage crooned.

If Fenris had anything to say about it, he’d be its ruin. But he could not bring himself to disillusion someone so pitiful. He nodded, and walked off. And when he looked back the beggar was picking the cashews from the ground and pressing them into his mouth with gusto, like they were covered with chocolate instead of mud.

He was the only one that would give Fenris the time of day. Even here in the floodplain encampments, they crossed the lanes to get away from him, and would not look him in the eye.

When Fenris had told Hawke that Danarius had flaunted him to intimidate his other Magisters, Hawke had looked somewhere short of confused. Which was nothing compared to the reactions he’d pulled from the others. Isabela had licked at his ear and run a few dimpled fingers over his chin and asked if he might put his fierce intimidation tactics to use making her shiver. Anders had snorted a pithy laugh and mocked him – _Yes, you’re just the scariest cute little elf I know. Woe is me. I think I might run crying to mummy._ Fenris had forgotten how casually intimidating he could be outside the social circle provided by his friends and associates in Kirkwall, let alone in Tevinter society.

It was not safe to leave the room. It was not safe to leave the room with with a weapon on display, and not safe to leave the room without it. Fenris kept his sword wrapped in paper and cloth. But what else could someone like him be carrying – A mandolin? A ream of paper? A Statue of Andraste? He practised giving these answers to anyone who might inquire, and they all fit him about as well as an Orleasian gown.

A dark elf with a stern look and a greatsword at his back, he was the very image of uncivilised barbarism.

Fenris had woken up with Varania’s face next to his. They were sprawled in opposite directions on the floor. She was staring up at the ceiling.

It took Fenris a while to come to his senses. There were cracks on the ceiling, every once in a while the steady thump of someone walking the floor above them. It was midday, and Merrill and Anders were gone. But the lyrium was thrumming and itching under his skin, and there was no need to invite further pain and irritation with movement.

“I thought you were eager to find work,” Fenris said. “You were so critical. Now you’re the one lazing about until who knows what hour.”

In the periphery of his vision, Fenris could see Varania’s face was composed. She did not take her eyes off the ceiling.

After a moment she spoke. “You seemed to enjoy lazing about like a pitiful unwashed bum. I thought I’d try it and see what all the fuss was about.”

The words were sharp, but Fenris barely felt them. It occurred to him that Varania was probably looking to the same spot on the ceiling that he was.

“I can’t say I understand the appeal,” Varania said. Although she continued to lay there, unmoving.

Fenris turned to look at her more directly. She did not turn to face him in return.

 _I suppose it’s escaped your notice she’s even more terrified of you?_ the abomination spat. _Why don’t you go threaten to rip her throat out again?_

“How do you… get closer to people?” Fenris asked.

Varania laid in silence for a while. Eventually she sighed. “I think you have to talk to them.”

“What if they’re afraid of you?” Fernis asked. “What if you’re afraid of them?”

Varania’s voice was guarded and neutral, and she still would not look at him. “Then you have to give each other reasons not to be afraid.”

In Kirkwall, there had been places with spikes on the high walls and turrets. Remnants of sieges where the harbour had been shut, or gates up the steps, and those inside defended their own. The spikes on the walls and pillars surrounding the Vashoth slums remind Fenris a little of that. Although here it was more of a prison, set to keep a hulking and threatening population inside and contained.

 _Kirkwall had been a prison too,_ the treacherous voice inside Fenris’s head reminded him. _You said it the first time you went to the Gallows: this place is like a prison. And then you spent seven years trying to take it back. And for what? It amounted to nothing in the end._

Fenris walked through the walls that encircled the block. He approached the first Vashoth that caught his attention – large and muscled, sitting on a stoop and repairing what appeared to be a fishing net. It was hard to imagine a hulking grey giant being afraid of someone as small as him, even if Fenris had killed more Qunari than anyone would care to know. He rushed, and spoke before he could lose his nerve.

“Why are you here?” he asked in Qunlat.

Fenris realised his voice sounds sharp, and too confrontational. He had said it too harshly, but Fenris meant it the same way he had meant it when he’d first left Tevinter and found other elves cowed and hiding in Alienages and barns and servants quarters throughout the South. He’d learned slowly why Merrill had resigned herself to its walls and anonymity, why Orana had been able to do nothing else but move into the room off the Amell Estate kitchens.

It was Fenris’s own ignorance, plain and simple. He had known more Qunari than Vashoth in his time in Tevinter, and the Vashoth in Kirkwall had been much like him – mercenaries fleeing the slavery the Qun and Tevinter both offered. It was hard for Fenris to imagine why any Vashoth would comparatively subject themself to being corralled in this slum in Tevinter, amongst people who only hated and mistrusted and feared them.

The Vashoth sighed and crossed his arms over his lap.

“We do not speak that language here,” he said in the common tongue.

Fenris felt himself flush. Of course it would have been forbidden for the Vashoth to speak Qunlat in Tevinter, save perhaps whispers in their own homes.

“We follow all the rules of Minrathous,” the Vashoth parroted. He eyed Fenris curiously. “Who do you work for?”

“For no one,” Fenris answered, surprised. He supposed he must have looked someone’s servant – with his clothes a little too well made and the hulking bundle on his back that could only conceal a weapon.

The Vashoth clicked his tongue. “You will not tell me?”

“I am my own man,” Fenris found himself saying, although he was not sure he should be saying it.

The Vashoth clearly did not believe him. “We’ve had others like you come before.” He studied Fenris ponderously, before folding up his net and standing. “The day is almost done. You will come in and sit with us, and you will see we have nothing to hide.”

Fenris thought about how Meredith had been ready to order room and body searches on the mages in the Gallows, and how Anders and Orsino and Hawke had been there to put a stop to it. And if Fenris had been here to do the same to this Vashoth, nobody would stop him. It was shame more than anything, that carried him inside the hovel.

It was larger than the room Fenris shared with Varania and the others, perhaps because the Vashoth were larger in stature, and there was a corridor that seemed to lead to another one.

“You can look around, and then you’ll sit,” the Vashoth said, pointing to a table in the centre, before he disappeared down the corridor.

Fenris shuffled awkwardly on his feet. He removed his sword and pack from his back, and hung them off the chair before he sat. He could look around just as well from here.

Half the room was filled with nets and scrap metal and other curios, laid out across the floor in a pattern for creation. The other half, which Fenris sat in the middle of, was a kitchen. The Vashoth had a sink and a stove and a counter top and cupboards, and a collection of broken pots and stained walls.

The Vashoth man reappeared through the corridor, leading another one with him. This one was more lean, and had tall, curling horns and large eyes and a delicate face. Fenris could not determine their gender.

If the two of them had spoken amongst each other, it had been too quiet for Fenris to hear.

“You may check the back room as well,” the first Vashoth offered.

“My, uh, thanks,” Fenris acknowledged. But he declined to move.

The two Vashoth stepped in next to each other, facing stove and sink. They worked silently, and passed things between them with the effortlessness of two who had done this all their lives. They did not have to look at one another to know the other’s hand would be there to meet theirs and leave lingering touches.

Fenris closed his eyes so as not to intrude. He wished it could have been like that with him and Varania, and Merrill, and Anders. Instead of the four of them so far out of tandem every moment was filled with angry screeching.

He did not know how long he sat there, to the sound of clinking plates and boiling water. One of the Vashoth had lit a pot of incense, and the smell reminded Fenris of some forgotten Seheron. He must have drifted because he startled when a pot and bowls was set in front of him. He swung his arm and knocked his sword loose from where it was leaned against the table, and it hit the floor with a dull metallic thud.

The Vashoth ignored it, as they took their places at the table and ladled bowls from the pot. Fenris was presented with a bowl of rice porridge, seasoned only with cardamom, and a smaller bowl with steamed spinach. It was meagre, but generous.

They ate with their hands, scooping bits of rice up into their fingers. Fenris picked a spinach leaf delicately between this nails. Nobody spoke until halfway through the meal.

“You see we have nothing to hide then,” the Vashoth man said.

Fenris was not sure he had seen that, so much as he’d seen two people who hadn’t really needed to be gracious with him, but were.

The Vashoth man looked at him with his nose crinkled a little too much to be weary. And Fenris wondered, abruptly, if they pitied him. They thought him a servant or a slave, sent here to spy on them. And he’d acted like one – tired and worn, in need of food and rest.

“What are your names?” Fenris asked.

“Asalit,” the Vashoth man said. It was a name, Fenris knew, not a title. “He is Marim,” Asalit pointed at the other, answering for him.

Marim gave him an ugly half-smile.

Fenris turned his head down to the table and continued eating.

He almost missed it, when Marim lifted his hands and signed against his chest and chin. Asalit returned lifted his own hands and made a quick abortive gesture.

Oh, so that was it. Fenris squinted at Marim’s mouth. He had healed well but, now that Fenris knew what to look for, Fenris could see faint little dots from where the holes in his lip had been.

“You don’t speak Qunlat, but you have your own cipher anyhow,” Fenris snorted.

It was the wrong thing to say, because Asalit was immediately guarded. “We follow all the rules of Minrathous,” he reiterated stoically.

“You were his Arvaarad?” Fenris asked. Because that explained the way they moved completely in synch. They moved as if they had done it all their lives because they had, only with one holding a leash and the other wearing a collar.

“I have since seen the error in my ways,” Asalit said the words by rote. “I am grateful to be given a place here in Tevinter.”

Marim had a bored expression on his face, as he slouched over the table.

Fenris remembered the Tranquil. “Even one dumb and useless and without a tongue, they would capture and cage in the south,” he said, ignoring an affronted huff from the Saarebas.

“We are grateful to be given a place here in Tevinter,” Asalit repeated.

“But things may change there,” Fenris continued. “There are uprisings all across the south of Thedas. The mages grow weary of their confinement. Perhaps they will succeed in pressing back against the Chantry, and there will be a place for you there.” He was swimming in dangerous waters, every sentence backed by assumptions he refused to acknowledge or give voice to.

“We are grateful to be given a place here in Tevinter.”

“You can’t be happy here,” Fenris hissed. “Not when you’re watched the way you are. Not when you allow me to barge into your home to eat your food and break your belongings.”

Marim looked away.

Asalit shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I am tired of wars.”

 _War will come find you, whether you tire of it or not_ , Fenris thought. But there was no point in saying it. They had closed themselves off to him. They were afraid of him too.

For today this was enough. They had answered the question Fenris had originally posed: he knew why they were here, and not elsewhere.

He shovelled down the rest of the spinach and rice, too large a mouthful to be polite – sucked at his fingers and rubbed his lip with his palm. And the others didn’t say anything as he gathered his things, slid a coin onto the table for the food, and left.

==

Yet another night.

There was shouting through the door and then silence when Fenris walked through it. All three of his roommates were seated around their table. Anders and Merrill were shuffling a deck of cards between them, and playing what could have only been the most pathetic game of Wicked Grace ever witnessed. They were sour faced and scowling, and exchanged cards by throwing them down on the table.

Varania sat between them, examining the surface of a lemon. She drew calloused fingers across the blemishes on its surface, and watched it glow. “Welcome back, brother.” She spoke without looking up from her task.

Fenris sat down at the table and Merrill dealt him into the game without pause. He looked between the faces of its occupants.

He pulled the Angel of Death twice in the next five minutes. Anders and Merrill were as poor a pair of players as ever, and not even livening the table with the levity they had contributed back in Kirkwall, where everyone knew Isabela and Varric would be taking the pot.

“Is… something the matter?” Fenris hesitated. He was not sure whether to be miffed about his exclusion from their scorn.

“Nothing,” Merrill said curtly.

“Only that I can’t draw a card higher than the Serpent of Sadness,” Anders groused.

“They’ve been arguing about magical classification,” Varania supplied. “They agreed to drop it once you came home. Since talk of magic makes you _un-com-fort-able_.” She enunciated each syllable, making it clear how foolish she thought this consideration.

Anders and Merrill both turned to glare at her.

Fenris shuffled the cards and dealt them each a new hand. “So this is your solution?” he tested them. “You simply won’t speak of anything of importance where my delicate non-mage ears can hear? It has never stopped you before.”

He spoke calmly, but he felt a low thrum of anger bubbling beneath. Fenris was not sure why he was challenging this, when by all accounts he did not wish to hear their magely squabbles.

Merrill and Anders both seemed uncomfortable and unsure. Fenris could see how they struggled against being goaded into a continuation of their argument.

Eventually Anders cleared his throat and turned to Varania, whose lemon had doubled in size and spouted several growths.

“Just so we’re clear, you’re not going to eat that, are you?” he advised softly, in his healer voice. “It’s entirely likely you’ve synthesized something poisonous.”

Varania scooted her stool to the left, closer to Merrill, and otherwise refrained from responding.

Fenris cleared his throat. “One can hardly be blamed for mistrusting mages when they keep secrets simply out of the arrogance and pride to think none of the rest of us might understand them,” he snipped.

Merrill was the first to rise to the bait. Skipping right over Fenris, she drew from the centre deck, immediately discarded her pick, and narrowed her eyes at Anders.

“I cannot believe how pigheaded you are,” she snapped. “You revile your Chantry and your Circles, and yet you persist in thinking they are the only ones with answers for anything.”

“Five schools just doesn’t make sense,” Anders insisted. “And an evil doesn’t have to be absolute to be inexcusable. It doesn’t mean I should have to throw out everything they taught me.”

Varania placed the lemon to her side and leaned back in her seat, grinning smugly at the chaos they had caused. Before Fenris could decide if he agreed with her sentiment, she motioned for some cards. Fenris hastened to deal her in.

“It isn’t ‘throwing anything out’ to acknowledge there are other paths one might follow,” Merrill said.

“It is though.” Anders frowned and rubbed at his wrist. “There aren’t two right ways to do things, Merrill. There’s right and wrong, and a right and wrong way to classify magic.”

“How do you play this game?” Varania asked, reaching across the table to show her hand to Fenris.

“You capture like cards as you draw and discard in turn,” Fenris said, pointing at the pair of Songs in Varania’s hand. “When the Angel of Death is drawn, everyone’s hands are called and compared. It is usually a gambling game, but these two are paupers so it is of no concern. It is easiest to learn specific hands as you go.”

“That way of thinking is exactly what’s wrong with you humans and your Chantry,” Merrill continued to harangue above them. “You accept the Maker or you’re some heathen who might as well be running about the woods in the nude. You do magic the good and ‘right’ way, or you deserve a brand stamped on your forehead.” This did make Anders flinch. “Things that don’t fit within their understanding or control might as well not exist. You’re a hypocrite for only being able to see that when it suits you.”

“Oh, yes, I’m the hypocrite,” Anders huffed. “I’m not the only one talking up a culture that has rejected her, sweetheart.” He gave a mocking grin. “Your clan could no more understood or control you. Tell me how well they reacted to that. Tell me about who was at your side when it all went to blighted hell.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “I believe it was three humans.”

Fenris drew a card and swapped it with Merrill’s discard. He slumped in his seat, as more barbs flew across the table. It had indeed been a poor course of action to encourage them.

Varania did not seem to be of the same mind. She hid her grin behind her cards, and asked in a pointedly loud and crisp voice. “And blood magic – is it spread out amongst the schools of magic, or its own thing?”

“It’s only an alternative fuel source,” Merrill said. At the same time Anders said, “It’s its own thing.”

They both huffed defensively.

“What good are your schools if they don’t even account for all applications of magic?!” Merrill accused. She drew and discarded without even looking at her cards.

“Yes,” Anders said sarcastically. “How terrible for the schools to not account for the practices of maleficarum.”

“You are not even a blood mage,” Merrill said, exasperated. “How can you think yourself an authority to speak over those who are actually practised in the art?”

“I’ve seen enough,” Anders said curtly. He frowned sourly at the card he’d drawn.

Merrill turned to Varania, apparently attempting to win the argument through conversion of followers. “The Evanuri, or the Maker if you’re into that sort of thing, in creating mortals they gave us form and blood to distinguish us from those on the other side of the Veil. It is the most personal and precious of our birthrights, and can be used to cast all types of magic without calling for the Fade.”

“Careful, Witch,” Fenris hissed. Varania looked far too interested, and it was not like he could stop her, but Merrill had become far too bold lately.

Fenris went ignored, as Anders spoke up. “And how do you account for the fact that blood magic can do things no other school of magic can do?”

“So?” Merrill sulked. “There are spells one cannot do without large amounts of lyrium. You never hear anyone talking about ‘lyrium magic’.”

“Maybe they should,” Anders said petulantly. “We’ll add blood magic and lyrium magic to the schools of magic, each in opposition. And it will still make more sense than your five schools!”

“Enough!” Fenris snapped. “I’ve watched Danarius cut down children for his blood magic, and the two of you are speaking of this like it’s simply a matter of academic debate?!”

“I’ve seen the same,” Varania hummed, as she rearranged the cards in her hand, “but I encourage you both to go on.”

Varania was the one ignored this time.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Fenris,” Merrill said sweetly. “Are your ‘delicate non-mage ears’ burning? If only we had thought not to discuss this around you.”

“Don’t bother,” Anders flipped the Angel of Death card around in his palm. “We’re stopping. I have to get going anyhow.” He dropped his hand on the table. It was predictably terrible, with only two angels, and neither high in number.

None of Merrill’s cards matched at all. That just left Varania, whose five songs beat out Fenris’s four knights.

“Beginner’s luck,” she said, as she drew the cards back in.

Anders retrieved his coat from where he’d laid it over the crate he’d been sitting atop. He was jostling it to shake out the wrinkles, and then drew his arm through one of the sleeves.

Fenris’s curiosity was urgent, and it got the better of him. “Where are you going?” Fenris asked.

“Anders,” Merrill called, in a voice that sounded almost conciliatory. “Are you planning on opening another clinic?”

It did not seem a coincidence which of these questions Anders chose to answer. “I was told to keep my head down for the time being, so no.” Anders too was oddly conciliatory, even flushed. “If any of your students or their families require anything you’re free to bring them to me, though. There were… many bad things about Kirkwall, but my business at the clinic was not one of them.”

Merrill nodded smoothly. “ _Viral ethal_. Be safe, lethallin.”

“Right, you as well,” Anders said by rote, as if it wasn’t only him heading out into the night. And though it seemed directed at Merrill first and foremost, he glanced to the rest of his company as if to extend the farewell out at the last minute. “Fenris. Varanaia.” And then he departed.

“He never answered my question,” Fenris pouted sourly at the table.

Neither Merrill or Varania rushed to fill this silence, as Merrill dealt another hand. They were a few rounds into the game when Varania’s nose wrinkled.

“Your clotty jar of blood is beginning to stink again,” Varania said.

“Ohhh,” Merrill seemed to bubble with frustration, before exhaling sharply. “I’ll go put it on ice,” she announced, and placed her hand face down on the table and walking off.

Varania reached over to discreetly peek at Merrill’s hand. She had apparently found a card she liked and replaced it with one in her hand.

“I see you’ve grasped the basic concept of this game,” Fenris said wearily. “But you do realise I am right here.”

“I thought you’d appreciate the chance to sell me out,” Varania said candidly. “Your choice, brother.”

==

The tavern’s called the Stinking Onion. It was located on the seedier edge of the central district, with Soporati clients being the majority, but not to the extent that a hooded elf would draw that much notice. Having checked the work boards and his nerves steadied by the application of an overpriced glass of wine, Fenris was ready to depart.

It was dark inside, and outside the sun was setting bright on the horizon, and Fenris winced. A good crowd of people were moving in and out of the tavern, and Fenris’s eyes were still adjusting. And, of course, that was when it happened.

They approached Fenris from the side, instead of head-on, and Fenris was still blindsided as the man looked down at him and said.

“I know you.”

Fenris turned up to the face, alight with recognition and suspicion, and Fenris was horrified to find that he, too, recognised this man. Or boy. Nocencius. Who was Magister Horacio’s Apprentice. Who Danarius mistrusted for his lack of morality. Who was a surly teenager the last time Fenris saw him. Which made him a fully grown man now, and probably a Magister in his own right, if those robes were anything to go by.

Nocencius opened his mouth to say more, or maybe to shout. And Fenris needed to stop him and so plunged his hand directly into the man’s chest and grasped his lung. The man wheezed, and this was harder for Fenris than usual, since he had only his bare hands, unable to wear his gauntlets about the city. But this was a blood mage and a Magister, and Fenris’s first and most formidable defence against them was the ability for a surprise close range attack. He was committed, so he severed the man’s windpipe and tore his left lung and shredded his heart the best he could with his own nails, before grasping the right lung and tugging it free completely. Fenris had done this too many times, and the added resistance of needing to tear the flesh with brute force was nothing in the end.

It was over in a matter of seconds. And more quietly than Fenris expected, although quiet was what he’d been going for. That just left Fenris standing in a crowd outside a tavern with a dead man slumped against his shoulder and a bloody lung clutched in his hand. He wrapped that hand around Nocencius’s back, above his robes but under a richly covered travel cloak, and tried his best not to panic.

Nobody was screaming bloody murder. Fenris forced himself not to scan the crowd, searching for who was watching suspiciously, and who was moving on in their distraction. But there seemed to be no guards eager to attack. And given that, it seemed probable that Nocencius’s visit here was in the vein of one casually slumming it.

He tried to imagine what this must look like. They had been standing so close for the duration of their altercation, it would have been difficult for anyone to see Fenris’s arm penetrate the man’s chest cavity. And even if they had, one might assume they’d been mistaken in their perception. _I know you_ – a mage had said, and given a few soft and pained exhales of breath, before collapsing over an elf’s shoulder. That could have been the reunification of two very unlikely friends, or a privileged john with some aged-out and long forgotten whore. If someone had missed Nocencius’s opening statement, perhaps Fenris was a slave supporting the gait of a drunken master.

It was what he had to work with, so- with his most stoic gaze, Fenris rearranged Nocencius’s corpse around himself – pressed against Fenris’s side, an arm around Fenris’s shoulder. He hiked Nocencius up against him at the hip, tried not to grind the lung to pulp in the process, and hoped that nobody would look too closely at Nocencius’s dangling feet as Fenris dragged him around the corner of the tavern and into the alleyway.

 _The master drank too much. He is feeling quite ill_ , Fenris practised in his head. But thankfully the alleyway was long and empty, save for a few stragglers at its entrance. The Stinking Onion was called such for a reason – grilled onion and spices, with the occasional bit of liver, being its unique speciality. The alley was filled with spoiled ingredients and the rotting husks of the things, and whatever else people brought by to dump. Fenris threw the lung in the pile – a lung was kind of like a liver. And he strode only a few more paces down, before deciding to stick the whole of Nocencius’s body under it.

He ripped the robes and cloak the best he could, and soiled them in the rot. And then laid the body down on a low spot and shovelled the garbage heap over the body the best he could. The thing was overrun with rats and bugs, perhaps even a mongoose or two, and- _good_. Hopefully they’d cannibalise the corpse into anonymity before anyone noticed it was there, or the _Servus Publicus_ came by to haul away the trash.

It was a hasty and messy job. And in the end Fenris could still see bits of Nocencius’s skin peeking out from underneath the garbage. But he didn’t need to get caught doing this here.

_Oh wasn’t it nice in Kirkwall? Where your friend was the Captain of the Guard?_

His arms were covered in filth, and he gave the pile one last glance before beelining to the back of the alley and back to the not-alienage.

==

“They might come after me again.”

Merrill blinked up at his scowl, the frantic canter of his voice. She appeared to be intently studying an alphabet primer, like it might carry some unforeseen secret and not simply everything she already knew. “What?” she asked. And wrinkled her nose at the stench, which Fenris thought was a little rich considering she was the one that kept a stinking rotting jar of blood at the side of her bedroll.

“You told me to warn you next time, so you weren’t caught off guard,” Fenris said, repentant.

Merrill seemed to consider this worth her distraction from her task. She closed her book and stood. “Everything’s okay, Fenris.” She took his hand in spite of the garbage and viscera dried to it, and Fenris was too scared to fight her off. “Why don’t you start from the beginning? You’re very confusing when you just jump into things at the middle.”

“Someone recognised me.” Fenris continued to explain the events of the morning. Merrill was a patient listener, and did not interrupt him save for small nods of her head and flicks of her ears.

When he was finished Merrill nodded contemplatively. “Oh, dear. Is that why you smell like a halla’s behind?”

Fenris did not grace this with a response. In telling what had happened, he’d worked himself into a panic. “I shouldn’t have left the body just laying in a heap!” he said frantically. “Do you think they can trace it back to me?”

“Can they?” Merrill urged. “ _Felas'el_. Be calm and answer.”

“I do not know,” Fenris admitted. He cursed to himself in Tevene. “I should have ripped the body to more pieces! A body untouched but for a pair of missing lungs isn’t exactly a method of death most can accomplish!”

“Yes,” Merrill agreed. “But will they know it was you?”

“I do not know!” Fenris insisted. “I do not know how much Danarius publicised the extent of my abilities, or my escape and subsequent actions. Tales of successfully escaped slaves need to be suppressed to discourage imitation attempts, but he wasn’t the most level-headed of men. And no doubt he spoke freely with some of his associates.” Fenris gritted his teeth. “I do not know… I should go back,” he decided. “Dispose of the body more thoroughly.”

“Fenris, no.” Merrill’s voice was sharp, and she held fast to his hand as he tried to tug it away. “You are smarter than that. Do not put yourself in a position to draw further attention to yourself.”

Merrill was right. For all they knew the body would be half rotted before anyone found it. Or it had already been found. And the untimely death would be attributed to the plotting of political enemies and rivals – not a spooked escaped slave nearly a decade gone and last seen in Kirkwall.

“It is done,” Fenris agreed.

“It is done,” Merrill repeated in a soothing voice. She patted his hand absently. “It would be a shame if it happened too quickly, before I could make plans for everyone at lessons. But if they should come for us here, we can run. We can fend off a half dozen of them for every one of us, so long as they don’t know what they’re walking into. We’ll take Anders and Varania and run. So long as they don’t know what to expect from us.”

“I- Yes,” Fenris agreed. Her confidence was absurd. But he knew from practical experience that, all other factors being equal, it would take several dozen trained men to hinder him with the blood mage and abomination both at his back.

“Are you feeling better?” Merrill set his hand back down against his thigh and left it. “Good,” she cooed, without waiting for his answer. “If you’re all done with that, I have something to ask you. While we’re still both alone?”

“What is it?” Fenris felt his suspicion peak.

“It’s very important, you know,” Merrill solemnly.

“Go on.”

“You’ve been with shemlen men before, right?” Merrill asked euphemistically. “Or at least you must have seen things, right? You’ve spent an awful lot of time around them.”

Fenris frowned. “Where is this conversation going?”

“Well, are all shemlen men so…?” Merrill trailed off discreetly. She pointed at her crotch twice in quick succession and then, with a squinty look on her face, lifted her hands and measured a liberal distance between her two index fingers. She repeated the gesture, looking at him meaningfully and waiting for him to get it.

Fenris felt himself flush a deep red. “No,” he scowled and turned away.

Merrill, obviously giddy with his discomfort, swivelled around the corners of his attempt to give her the cold shoulder. She pursed her lips up at him in apparent confusion. “Sorry Fenris- Was that a no, the rumours aren’t true and most shems are reasonably sized? Or was that a no, I am not discussing this further with you?”

Fenris had meant the former but- “I am not discussing this with you further!”

The door to the room chose then to open, and Fenris grimaced.

“What are we discussing?” Varania asked, as she stalked inside. And then, before Fenris could hope she hadn’t been listening through the door, she added, “My brother’s fatal and perverse attraction to shem men?”

Merrill hunched her shoulders and crossed her arms loosely over her chest. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, though she appeared red faced and only a moment away from a fit of giggles.

“That’s my brother, swooning and fawning.” Varania placed a hand at her forehead, gave a dramatic sigh, and pretended to be weak in the knees. “He seemed like such a robust and manly youth at a glance. But he used to puff himself up like a preening bird every time those big shems walked by, like he was dying to be noticed. And then he’d get so heartbroken and soft in the eyes when he wasn’t.”

Merrill could not contain her giggles at this point. “Oh, he was like that with all of them in Kirkwall too. Isabela. Hawke. Remember all those excuses you and Sebastian came up with to touch each other’s hair? When you got drunk you’d talk about how fluffy it was.”

“Well, all his puffing up and putting on airs worked one day of course,” Varania said mirthfully. “Mother was all worried they’d chose him for a catamite, and that he’d never settle down properly with a family, insofar as you can when you’re a slave. Can only wonder what she’d think of him now?”

They were both laughing, like this was something cute and funny. Like this wasn’t the disappointments of a mother he couldn’t remember. Or the reason he had wasted so much time taking things slow with Isabela. Or some ugly muddled part of his identity and suffering that he did not want, but could not disown because he had so little else. Like Fenris was a fool. Only he had been a fool. He preferred to think that Danarius had chosen him for a warrior, not a bed partner. All the kisses and touches and violations had come later. But maybe that was a foolish belief in of itself, and everyone had known to who and for what he had given himself for.

“Will you stop laughing over what I was to Danarius?!” Fenris hissed, before he could squash the impulse.

Merrill stopped laughing immediately. She looked contrite, but not surprised. Fenris wondered which was worse – if Isabela had told her, or if he’d really been so transparent that she knew without ever having heard it before.

“Ew!” Varania said. “Who would laugh about that?” She wrinkled her nose like he was the disgusting one for suggesting it.

Neither sibling relented for a second. But Varania seemed to piece something together faster than he did.

“You don’t remember Atilius,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

The mood in the room had gone sombre and sour, but Varania retreated to lean against the table and dutifully relayed second-hand details of a life Fenris couldn’t remember.

“Atilius was one of the human slaves that worked above us at the estate,” Varania said. “Very dashingly handsome in the way shems consider dashingly handsome. Well built, with dark hair and sharp cheekbones. He had a reputation as a playboy who would target elvhen slaves. Who was going to stop him? So long as he never made it a problem for the masters, never shirked his work or flaunted himself in their presence, what did they care for who he hurt?”

“It was the same in all the places I have been,” Merrill replied. And Fenris realised at some point Varania had started directing this story at her, perhaps because he was refusing to meet her eye. “It sounds like you all had your own little alienage at the estate,” Merrill continued. “A whole miniature community.”

“We did,” Varania agreed. “I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. We had to look after our own – there was nobody else that would look after us.” The pitch of her voice changed slightly, as she continued the story. “We all told my brother he was a fool to pine after the handsome shem, that he’d only be heartbroken in the end. But, you know how he is, of course he didn’t listen. Two weeks of giddy trysts later and several beatings for missing his work, and he was tossed aside. And you know how miserable he is when he’s sulking.”

“Aww, poor Fenris,” Merrill said. “It’s a story I’ve heard many times before. And, although it is a lesson that is necessary to learn, it never fails to cut deep for one experiencing it for the first time.”

“Well, it could have been worse,” Varania dismissed. “It’s not like he was going to walk away from their encounters pregnant. It was always hell for the pregnant girls. They expect you to go on working and lifting like normal, without rest, until you’re nearly wider than you are tall.”

Merrill clicked her tongue and cooed sadly. “Are you alright, Fenris?” She approached, and ducked down to peer up at his face.

Fenris glanced at her, and spoke through the frog in his throat. “Fine.”

Oddly, it was true. Maybe this had been a sad and painful experience for Leto. But Fenris could not remember the pain or betrayal or disappointment of what was, at the end of the day, simply a bad break-up.

If anything, Fenris felt a little relieved. Isabela had been very good at setting him at ease, and encouraging him to enjoy himself and his desires as they were now, when he was as free a man as he could be. But without Isabela around to make that easy for him, it was comforting to know that he had been like this, gawking at the stoutness and shapeliness of humans, and human men, before Danarius had truly entered the picture.

“He’s having a moment,” Merrill relayed to Varania in a stage whisper.

“I’ll bet,” Varania snorted. There was a strange pause that Fenris could not read, and then Varania said, almost tentatively. “You know my brother well then. You’re accustomed to his deviant nature. It doesn’t bother you?”

“Why would it?” Merrill asked. And there was a whole conversation between the lines there, which Merrill ignored. “Never mind. Fenris, there is one more thing I have to ask you.”

Fenris felt his shoulders droop. These people were exhausting. “You truly have no sense of tact,” he said. Which, all in all, was giving Merrill the benefit of the doubt. Far more likely she was encouraging the speeding whiplash in the conversation on purpose.

Merrill pressed on. “Can I borrow some money?”

Fenris frowned. “I wasn’t aware you needed my permission to do so,” he said curtly. “And _borrow_ instead of just take? Should I be expecting repayment?”

“It’s just I usually only take a coin or two and this is quite a _lot_ of money by comparison,” Merrill said. “And I don’t think it will be accepted unless I get permission first.”

Fenris squinted. “How much?”

“Oh, about a hundred of them.”

“What could you possibly need a hundred sovereigns for?” Fenris demanded.

“If she’s borrowing money, can I have some too?” Varania cut in.

“And what do _you_ need money for?”

“Does it matter?” Varania shrugged defensively. “You’ll give money to her, but not to me? You won’t even call her your friend, and I’m your _sister_.”

Fenris grunted and scratched the brands at his wrist.

“Maybe I’ll buy some jewellery,” Varania said absently. “I’ve never owned a piece of jewellery in all my life.”

Fenris tried not to grit his teeth in frustration, because she had. Just she hadn’t known it. He’d gone with Isabela to buy just a few things to prepare for her visit to Kirkwall. Isabela advised him against earrings, when they did not know if Varania’s ears were pierced. And against rings, when they did not know Varania’s size. They’d bought silver bracelets, delicately carved, with a hinge and clasp. And a brooch with pearls. And he’d bought Isabela a pair of silver hoop earrings and watched her ears as she twirled. And they bought a few finely woven sashes from another vendor, and fruits and nuts and cheese and pastries to stock the cupboards, and hired someone to help clean the hall and entryway and a guest bedroom. And when Varania arrived in Kirkwall all of their preparations had gone to waste.

“Fenris, please,” Merrill persisted. And for all she and Varania stood an appropriate distance away, Fenris felt as if they were both crowding him, bombarded by their pleading and expectations.

“Fine! Yes, fine!” He flailed about, as if to push them away. He ducked down for the loose floorboard, and retrieved his pack, and Merrill and Varania sat about him, like children begging for sweets. With dirty hands covered in rotten onions, he counted dirty money. One hundred sovereigns for Merrill and, after some contemplation, another fifty for Varania.

Merrill accepted the stack of coins with a perfunctory and entitled ‘thank you’, before bouncing off to stow them in her own pack. Fenris grumbled, before turning his attention back to Varania.

“I believe I also owe you a new wash basin,” he admitted as he handed over the coin. “We’ve been careless in how your old one is used.”

Varania snorted. “It’s no trouble. You don’t know where that thing’s been.” Her attention was elsewhere, as she tucked the coins into a handkerchief, and flattened it into her sewing kit.

Fenris was not sure what to make of the disappointment he felt. He had thought his offer a considerate gesture, and like all the gestures of consideration he tried to offer Varania, it seemed carelessly discarded.

He felt very transparent when Varania looked up, and seemed to see this in him.

“Well, it has been difficult sharing bathing equipment with the three of you,” Varania finally agreed. Her nose wrinkled. “Also you stink. So if you wish to make it up to me, there is something else we could do.”

==

Merrill was practically bouncing off the ceiling when they arrived, mouth moving a mile a minute with commentary and questions, so Fenris passed the coin to her and let her be the one to roll up to the service desk and bother the attendant instead.

Fenris lingered behind with Varania. The entryway was sparse and undecorated, but it was clean – immaculately so for the amount of traffic it appeared to have gotten. Varania seemed correct in her assertion that this was the nicest bathhouse in their part of the city.

Varania crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. She nodded her head at Merrill, who was pointing manically between the diagrams and notes posted behind the counter. The elvhen man at the counter following the rapid-fire movements the best he could.

“She’s easily impressed, isn’t she?” Varania asked.

Fenris considered this. “One time she spent the better part of an hour giving me a play-by-play of a mugging,” he admitted.

Varania opened and closed her mouth several times, before making a frustrated sort of sound. “You should make more of an effort,” she finally said. “If you know she is easy to please, you shouldn’t have so much trouble doing it.”

Before Fenris could think of a suitable response to this, Merrill bounced back with a glowing runestone in her hand.

“He said it will unlock the fourth door on the left,” she beamed. “Ooh, can I open it? This is so exciting! We didn’t have so much magical architecture in Kirkwall.”

Merrill led them through the corridor, past the other patrons, and pressed the runestone to the slot on the door with giddy excitement. She didn’t wait for Fenris to shut the door behind them before pulling her tunic up over her head.

Varania was a little more discreet. There was a line of cubbyholes just inside, some filled with baskets of soaps and tinctures and brushes, others with towels. Varania turned to face an empty one and tugged at the drawstrings of her dress.

Fenris grabbed one of the baskets and headed further into the bathing chamber to find a corner to huddle and undress in. The bathing room was not very large, not so extravagant as the bathhouses he’d visited with Danarius. But there were faucets high along the walls to dispense hot water, and a large tub built into the floor in the centre of the room. It was omitting a pleasant floral scent, not strong enough to be overpowering, and warm to the touch. And none of the water had the unpleasant sting of salt, the way the water reservoir that fed their apartment building obviously had a leak out to the sea.

Fenris had not seen a bath so nice in nearly a decade. Kirkwall, for all its charms, seemed to have a persistent problem with hygiene. There were no public baths, and few private baths anywhere below the Hightown gates. And even in Hightown many eschewed proper bathing for dousing oneself with perfume. Fenris found himself absorbed completely in the task of scrubbing soap into his hair and skin, and watching the grime flake off at the application of scalding water.

When he was done, his skin felt raw and throbbed dully from the abrasive scratch of the brush. But it was a good kind of pain. Fenris went to soak in the tub.

Varania was already there, with her hair already brushed and tied in a knot above her head. She was examining a set of bath oils with a pinched expression on her face. It occurred to Fenris that his sister was reasonably proportioned, and probably conventionally attractive if one could ignore the defects in her personality.

Merrill skidded across the tiles and came to a halt at the edge of the tub. “So we just go ahead and splash in, right? Good.”

Age showed better on Merrill’s body than her face. Her skin and flesh hung just a little loose. She had a litany of fine lined scars up her forearm like a ladder, and Fenris would prefer to believe them all the product of blood magic. She flopped down, and took a seat across him in the bath. And her stringy hair was longer than Fenris had been aware, when she undid her braids. Or undid them until Varania became sick of her languid pace and scooted over to do it for her.

Merrill accepted this as a matter of course and tilted her head so Varania could reach more easily. “I expected this to be dirtier,” she said conversationally. “They tell all these scandalous stories about bathhouses over in the Free Marches and Ferelden. But this is all very normal. The man didn’t even make a dirty joke when I asked for a family bath. At least I don’t think he did. It’s possible I missed it.”

“It’s not dirty,” Varania huffed. “Everyone knows it’s just that southerners have perverted minds.”

“He only seemed surprised we were getting a family room all to ourselves,” Merrill said wistfully. “But we can’t do anything else, seeing as Fenris is so terribly shy.”

“ _Fenhedis_ ,” Fenris spat. He could hardly be blamed for not wanting half of Minrathous staring at his brands. “Perhaps the attendant was surprised because _we’re not a family_.”

“My brother and I are not often taken for siblings,” Varania agreed. “The resemblance isn’t very strong.” Which was true. Her complexion was significantly lighter than Fenris’s, and Merrill’s was significantly lighter than hers.

“Oh, nonsense,” Merrill said. “You’ve both got the same eyes and brows and little chin. You’re very cute. Two peas in a pod~”

Varania raised a sceptical eyebrow and leaned down to exhale into the water.

“And- _Dirthara ma, Fenris_ ,” Merrill quipped lightly. “We’ve known each other almost eight years. We spent at least two of them as consort to the same woman. We are at least sort of family.”

Varania’s nose scrunched. “Oh, great,” she said darkly. “You’re both perverts then, too.” And then before either of them could confirm or deny it. “Is that who this ‘Isabela’ was, then?”

Merrill hugged her knees to her chest and bobbed excitedly in the water. “Oh, she was wonderful!” she gushed. “Wild and free, and beautiful. She had been through so much, but she was never unkind or bitter because of it. Careless, at times. And she would act calloused, but really she was soft and sweet… I loved her. I think Fenris did too. But neither of us wanted to weigh her down.” Merrill inhaled a keen breath through her nose, and turned her misty eyes down to the water. “She finally had a ship to captain, after having been stranded ashore for so long… It would not have been right to ask her to stay, to watch us cut away pieces of ourselves.”

Varania studied them both. And what a pair they must have made – limp and sad and sentimental.

“Nothing to add?” Varania asked him. And when there was no answer- “It seems we’ve finally found the one thing you two agree on.”

“Yes,” Fenris agreed hoarsely.

“Well, she must have been something, to string the both of you along like that.” Varania’s tone made it clear that she wasn’t sure how much she thought of that something.

Merrill pursed her lips. Fenris felt the odd impulse to reassure her it hadn’t been like that, and then stopped himself. Merrill didn’t need him to tell her who Isabela was. And neither of them needed Varania’s approval.

Fenris sighed. He leaned his head back and sunk deeper into the water. “I suppose we have known each other a long time, if we’re capable of such reminiscences.”

He could hear the smile in Merrill’s voice. “And to many more years to come,” she toasted.

“You’re both so odd. Strangers.” Varania sounded vexed.

“Oh, don’t be jealous,” Merrill chided. “You’ll catch up. All it takes is some time… Here, I’ll wash your back for you.”

“Who would be jealous of a pair of deviants like you?” Varania said. But it was small and sad, and then there was the sound of laving water and the scrubbing bristles of a brush.

Merrill’s voice was a soft croon. “I’ll tell you a story, lethallan, if you’d like. I’ll tell you about _Asha’bellanar_ , and how two Fereldens named Hawke came to Sundermount with a Tevinter Flat Ear that made a terrible first impression. I’ll tell you how much of a fool I was back then.”

She started the story without waiting for Varania’s answer. And it was strange, listening to Merrill attend to his sister in the bath, and whisper about the people they were not any more. He thought to stay, so he might take offence if Merrill spoke ill of him. But what ills could she speak that were not, on some level, true? He’d been many things with her – standoffish, jealous, cruel, hypocritical even in the things he’d spoken truly of.

Angry. Insecure. Afraid.

At times far more a fool than her.

Fenris sat up and ran his hand through his hair, before climbing out of the bath.

“I will dress and wait for you two outside,” he announced. To his sister who had curled in on her knees and bared her back. To Merrill who rubbed brush and fingers over her, peeling loosening skin. She gave Fenris an understanding nod, without pausing in her story.

_They were so desperate to be rid of me, I suppose they might have given me to anyone who walked by. We did not realise that Ghilan’nain had led a specific solemn few to the foot of that mountain._

Fenris towelled himself off. It was difficult to get dry in the humidity of the baths, but it would hardly be better outside. Monsoon season would be upon them before long. He worked his way through three different towels, before deciding this was about as dry as he was going to get, and pulling on his leggings and jacket.

_We had traded with the shemlen before, though always with arrows trained and ready to fly. They often brought elvhen servants with them, and we thought it was to rub our noses in what we had lost, what they thought to make of us. We were suspicious, and not without reason. There was no cause to think this party any different. Until our Keeper saw the symbol on the amulet Hawke pulled from her sleeve._

Fenris exited on Merrill’s story. Through the narrow corridors of the bathhouse, and out the front for fresher air. The attendants did not question him.

He stood vigil at the entrance, watching the patrons move in and out, many people like a sea. When he saw a Qunari sweeper, small for her race, with a rubbish cart. She was picking litter and dirt that the bathhouse’s visitors had left not moments ago, and turning into the alley to sweep there as well.

Fenris remembered having noticed this bathhouse was very clean for a place with so much use, and now wondered what manner of arrangement had been made with the _Servus Publicus_ to keep the street in front of it so well cared for.

He thought to ask the sweeper and, after a moments hesitation, pressed off the wall at the bathhouse entrance and followed her into the alley. Coughed awkwardly. “Er, Miss?” he called.

Fenris was not quite sure what he’d expected, but it was not for the sweeper to stow her rags and broom aside the cart and bolt down the opposite end of the alley with nary a look to him. Her feet moving in a rapid set of what appeared coordinated falls. And it surprised him how quick she was able to move with the garbage-heavy cart dragging behind on squeaky wheels.

It did not occur to Fenris he might have given chase until the sweep was safely out of sight.

It was not the time or the place, but Fenris stowed this idea in the back of his head, before returning to the entrance of the bathhouse to wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Merrill’s ‘insult’: “Because you are brithavast haor’lin. Ar ma tel'gelan.” -> “Because you’re a jealous little lamb. I don’t fear you.”


End file.
